It was called the Graphics Standards Manual, and it was produced for the MTA by Massimo Vignelli and Bob Noorda, two then-unknown designers who worked at Unimark International at the time. A recent New Yorker article about the golden age of corporate identities discussed their manual as one perfect example of the era—concise, utterly practical, and incredibly prescient.

It's unclear how many of these red-covered manuals are still around, but one copy was recently rediscovered by three young designers—Hamish Smyth, Niko Skourtis and Jesse Reed—who work at the NYC graphic design giant Pentagram. As Smyth told me this week, the manual was discovered entirely by accident, as two designers rooted around in Pentagram's basement looking for something else entirely.

"They were searching the basement for a tarpaulin to cover our outdoor foosball table when they stumbled upon the manual at the bottom of a staff locker under a bunch of old gym clothes," Smyth explained. "For graphic designers, this is like stumbling on a first edition Gutenberg Bible. Well, perhaps that is a bad analogy, because graphic designers would also have a hard time containing themselves over that." (via)